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I'm in a good mood right now, but i wanted to vent a little before receiving my new piece of hardware because, honestly, the GPU situation is kind of a mess.
For the record, i had a RTX 3060ti i've had to sell to pay some unexpected bill, and i've been haging out with a faulty R9 290X until i was given the budget to get a new GPU paid in installments. 12 €/month max. And since Mother's day is close over here, i decided to take advantage of current sales to get a RX 6700 (base, non XT) for around that price.
I was team red before, so it felt natural to get back to it. Similar performance too.
I've been looking into it a lot while i wait for delivery, and honestly, the price/performance/TDP ratio is amazing.
But also, it kind of sucks.
I've been intrigued by Ray tracing ever since i read an article about it in the '90s, that explained it for the average Joe. It was fascinating to know that, while developers struggled during the early 3D days to get credible colored lighting running on their games, there was a technique that was being actually used in 3D animation and other environments, its only downside was that it took around a day to render a single frame, but it simulated real lighting. It was cool.
I've been waiting for it to be able to apply it on gaming for decades, and the dream was finally achieved with Nvidia's RTX 2000 series. THAT's what made me go team green. And it was worth it.
Until it wasn't.
Enter the RTX 3000 series, RTX performance is improved (yay!) but in exchange Nvidia seemingly didn't make almost any advances regarding VRAM. Sure, they went with GDDR6 and GDDR6X, but the amounts are basically the same, and it has come to bite users in the ass. Even Forza Horizon 5, the best optimized non-Doom game of the generation, was giving me VRAM warnings with RT enabled.
And prices relative to the 2000 series had gone up, even post-pandemic.
On the other hand there's AMD, the underdog. As i said, i've always been team Red, if anything, because their components have always been affordable and light on power consumption (the Bulldozer/FX line of CPUs doesn't exist, ok?). They've stayed in that line right until this current gen (Ryzen 7000 and RX 7000 series) and they're pretty good with VRAM, meaning that you get decent amounts of video memory and amazing performance for much lower prices. I chose the RX 6700 precisely because it's only a 7% slower than my past RTX 3060 ti. I can live with that.
But man, that Raytracing performance. WHY!?
Eurogamer's review is pretty much explicit about it, and that's talking about the superior XT version. Sure, FSR will soften the blow a lot, but so does DLSS with Nvidia hardware.
In exchange, AMD is, again, good with VRAM, they've always been in fact. The Raden RX 580 is still a valid GPU both thanks to its raw power and its 8GB of VRAM, even the 570 can work if you fiddle with the settings a bit. The card i'm waiting for is not different: 10GB of GDDR6 VRAM for a card whose performance is around the 8GB 3060ti at around half the price. Honestly, it's great that i wont see that pesky You're short on Video Memory warning on Forza Horizon 5. Pretty reassuring in fact, i've hated those warnings ever since i started getting them on my HD 5450 (yes, i used to game with that, yes, it worked, in fact i went through GTA4 with it)
Wich takes me to the question that opens this thread: WHY do we have to choose between video memory and Raytracing performance? WHY can't we have both in the same card, and for a reasonable price, to boot. It may sound like wanting to have my cake and eating it too, but recent developments (like AMD admitting to not lowering the current GPU prices, and Nvidia clearly artificially rising them thanks to the mining craze) make clear that it's possible to have a healthy GPU market where buyers don't have to choose between one thing or another, moreso when, as cross gen releases slowly die down, Raytracing becomes more and more integrated in games.
For power consumption and heat dissipation reasons i get consoles not having a particularly good RT performance (in fact, i would've waited another gen to add RT capabilities to consoles) but what prevents AMD from being more agressive with it in their GPUs? And why's Nvidia still so stingy with VRAM when their GPUs are ridiculously expensive to the point of sales plummeting at a ridiculous speed?
Well, that was my vent thread. For those wondering, i'm happy with my purchase, but actively comparing both sides made me think about this. I miss the times where the only difference between Nvidia and AMD were drivers and their target audience.
For the record, i had a RTX 3060ti i've had to sell to pay some unexpected bill, and i've been haging out with a faulty R9 290X until i was given the budget to get a new GPU paid in installments. 12 €/month max. And since Mother's day is close over here, i decided to take advantage of current sales to get a RX 6700 (base, non XT) for around that price.
I was team red before, so it felt natural to get back to it. Similar performance too.
I've been looking into it a lot while i wait for delivery, and honestly, the price/performance/TDP ratio is amazing.
But also, it kind of sucks.
I've been intrigued by Ray tracing ever since i read an article about it in the '90s, that explained it for the average Joe. It was fascinating to know that, while developers struggled during the early 3D days to get credible colored lighting running on their games, there was a technique that was being actually used in 3D animation and other environments, its only downside was that it took around a day to render a single frame, but it simulated real lighting. It was cool.
I've been waiting for it to be able to apply it on gaming for decades, and the dream was finally achieved with Nvidia's RTX 2000 series. THAT's what made me go team green. And it was worth it.
Until it wasn't.
Enter the RTX 3000 series, RTX performance is improved (yay!) but in exchange Nvidia seemingly didn't make almost any advances regarding VRAM. Sure, they went with GDDR6 and GDDR6X, but the amounts are basically the same, and it has come to bite users in the ass. Even Forza Horizon 5, the best optimized non-Doom game of the generation, was giving me VRAM warnings with RT enabled.
And prices relative to the 2000 series had gone up, even post-pandemic.
On the other hand there's AMD, the underdog. As i said, i've always been team Red, if anything, because their components have always been affordable and light on power consumption (the Bulldozer/FX line of CPUs doesn't exist, ok?). They've stayed in that line right until this current gen (Ryzen 7000 and RX 7000 series) and they're pretty good with VRAM, meaning that you get decent amounts of video memory and amazing performance for much lower prices. I chose the RX 6700 precisely because it's only a 7% slower than my past RTX 3060 ti. I can live with that.
But man, that Raytracing performance. WHY!?
Eurogamer's review is pretty much explicit about it, and that's talking about the superior XT version. Sure, FSR will soften the blow a lot, but so does DLSS with Nvidia hardware.
In exchange, AMD is, again, good with VRAM, they've always been in fact. The Raden RX 580 is still a valid GPU both thanks to its raw power and its 8GB of VRAM, even the 570 can work if you fiddle with the settings a bit. The card i'm waiting for is not different: 10GB of GDDR6 VRAM for a card whose performance is around the 8GB 3060ti at around half the price. Honestly, it's great that i wont see that pesky You're short on Video Memory warning on Forza Horizon 5. Pretty reassuring in fact, i've hated those warnings ever since i started getting them on my HD 5450 (yes, i used to game with that, yes, it worked, in fact i went through GTA4 with it)
Wich takes me to the question that opens this thread: WHY do we have to choose between video memory and Raytracing performance? WHY can't we have both in the same card, and for a reasonable price, to boot. It may sound like wanting to have my cake and eating it too, but recent developments (like AMD admitting to not lowering the current GPU prices, and Nvidia clearly artificially rising them thanks to the mining craze) make clear that it's possible to have a healthy GPU market where buyers don't have to choose between one thing or another, moreso when, as cross gen releases slowly die down, Raytracing becomes more and more integrated in games.
For power consumption and heat dissipation reasons i get consoles not having a particularly good RT performance (in fact, i would've waited another gen to add RT capabilities to consoles) but what prevents AMD from being more agressive with it in their GPUs? And why's Nvidia still so stingy with VRAM when their GPUs are ridiculously expensive to the point of sales plummeting at a ridiculous speed?
Well, that was my vent thread. For those wondering, i'm happy with my purchase, but actively comparing both sides made me think about this. I miss the times where the only difference between Nvidia and AMD were drivers and their target audience.
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